What's This?
by wujy
Summary: After someone new arrives in Halloween Town, Jack discovered that there's more to the world than what happens during the holidays.


A/N: Game 12, Chaser 3 for the Holyhead Harpies. Prompts: (Category) Movies, Nightmare Before Christmas; (word) utopia; (dialogue) "Who the bloody hell is that?"; (location) King's Cross Station.

Word Count: ~2,400 words (a little less)

* * *

"Jack! Someone find Jack! It's terrible! It's unthinkable! It's inconvenient! Jack!"

The Mayor of Halloween Town jogged precariously down Pumpkin Lane on his too-thin legs, his head twisted around to reveal a distressed expression.

"Jack!" he cried again wildly, rounding the corner to The Pumpkin King's house and nearly losing his footing. When he saw Jack already descending the staircase to the street below, his head spun rapidly and landed on a smile.

"Jack!" he shouted with relief before his face turned back to an unhappy one. "Oh, Jack, it's awful," he moaned.

"What's awful?" Jack asked, sounding equal parts curious and annoyed as he closed the gate that led up to his house. "What's all this shouting about?"

"You have to come quick, Jack," the mayor said, grabbing Jack by his bony arm and leading him toward the town square.

Jack allowed himself to be pulled along by the mayor, but not without an intense furrowing of the bony ridge that made up his brow. "Now, mayor," Jack said, his curiosity fully giving way to his irritation, "I insist that you tell me what's going on immediately."

"It's someone new, Jack!" the mayor sputtered, not looking back at the much-taller figure. "Someone new in Halloween Town!"

Jack was confused for a second, but after that, the mayor didn't have to drag him any further. Jack's long legs outstripped the mayor's tottering pace many times over, and he had arrived in the town square long before the mayor had time to register what had happened.

Jack could hear the stranger before he could see him. He was apparently struggling against Lock, Shock, and Barrel, who were detaining him.

"Just hold still!" Lock shrieked in a voice that could be heard down the street. " _Jack'll_ decide what to do with you."

"Jack?" demanded the stranger in a hoarse voice. "Who the bloody hell is that?"

"That would be me," Jack said in an expansive tone, stepping over the ring of on-looking denizens. In the muddle of the ring, he could see now, was a scruffy-looking human with long, black hair and sunken eyes. Lock, Shock, and Barrel were clinging to his various limbs, and he was attempting to pry them off without success.

The human's eyes widened when he saw the imposing skeleton approach, and he struggled harder against his three child-sized captors. "We've got him, Jack!" they chanted in unison. "We've got him for sure!"

"What _is_ it?" asked Barrel, who was hanging upside-down from the stranger's left arm.

"Let go!" the human roared at them. "I have to get back home."

"Yes..." Jack said pensively, one hand on his chin as he knelt next to the human. "Yes, you do," he agreed, though his skull was alight with wonder and fascination.

The human turned to face Jack, and as if on cue, the trick-or-treaters fell away from him, and skittered off into the crowd like cockroaches. In turn, Jack turned to the villagers and shooed them away. "That's enough," he called to them in a calming-but-authoritative tone. "I know you're all worried, but I'll ask you to please return to your homes, hovels, and hidey-holes. There's nothing to see here."

Slowly, the crowd began to dissipate with the faint murmuring sounds of hushed panicky musings and dissatisfied curiosities. Satisfied, Jack turned back to the human.

"How did you even get here?" Jack asked, revolving around the human on his spindly legs, surveying him from every direction. He looked disturbingly like an enormous spider contemplating a hapless fly in its web. "The gateways to the human world are only open on Halloween, and even then, humans can't usually come through."

The human watched uncomfortably as Jack spoke, but answered the question anyway.

"I... I'm not entirely sure," he admitted. "I fell, I think, and when I woke up, I was in the woods. Except... Except, I couldn't find the door where I'd come through."

"Door?" Jack asked, sounding a little too interested. "What sort of door?" he asked quickly. "What shape? A clover? A heart? Was it a turkey?" he asked urgently.

"N-no," the human answered, startled by the nature of these questions. "Just... Just an arch, I think, with a curtain. I don't remember. It was rather... _abrupt._ "

Jack's toothy grin extinguished at this news as his excitement waned slightly. He looked thoughtful again, then snapped his fingers. He stuck his thumb and forefinger between his teeth and blew, which produced a high-pitched whistle despite his not having any lips or, presumably, a tongue. A moment later, accompanied by an enthusiastic barking sound, a wispy ghost-of-a-dog bounded into the town square, weaving in between Jack's legs, red nose shining bright.

"Zero," Jack greeted with affection, somehow petting the intangible pooch. "I need your help, Zero," Jack urged the little terrier. He touched one long, bony index finger to Zero's bright red nose. "I need your nose again," Jack said. "That wonderful nose."

Jack pointed to the human. "Take a good whiff, Zero," Jack said, "and follow the human's scent back to where he came from. Can you do it?"

Zero yapped brightly and whirred around the stranger, jabbing his nose indecently and without shame into every nook, sniffling deeply. When he seemed satisfied, he gave Jack a follow-me bark and sped away toward the forest, passing a heavily-panting mayor on his way.

"The human's name is Sirius, in case you were wondering," the man said, sounding frustrated. Jack, however, appeared not to have heard him.

"The game is on!" Jack cried jubilantly before following Zero while the mayor tried in vain to regain his breath. Sirius side-stepped the mayor, who was looking a little blue as he collapsed to the ground, and chased after them despite his incredulity that this was all really happening.

Zero, at first, seemed to be an unreliable tracker. He stopped at every tree and gravestone along the way, sniffing intently and interestedly before moving on. Jack seemed unperturbed, but Sirius was getting more and more annoyed as the endless night went on. They searched the woods so long that he began to wonder if the sun _ever_ rose in this accursed place. Finally, however, the odd group passed a cluster of closely-grown trees that triggered something in Sirius's memory, and he held back, staring at the trees and thinking. Jack, who had been almost too caught up in the fun of the search to notice, had to double back to find the anomalous human staring at an ordinary tree.

Without speaking, Sirius turned to his left and walked around the cluster of trees, eyes playing around sharply for anything else that looked familiar. Jack followed him wordlessly, anticipation rising in his chest at the thought of a new discovery.

"This," Sirius began, wagging one finger as he tried to jog his memory. "This feels familiar... This is—" He stopped abruptly as he reached the top of a hill and caught sight of what he they'd been trying to find. "There!" he shouted, pointing at a stone arch standing in the center of a clearing in the thick forest. There was a dark curtain hanging in the arch, waving in a breeze that seemed to come from nowhere. He took off running a moment later, but Jack was faster and already caressing the stone of the doorway delicately by the time Sirius reached it. Without stopping, Sirius ran straight into the flapping curtain... and rebounded off some invisible force, falling backward onto the ground.

"Oh, my," Jack said, taking Sirius by the wrist to help him to his feet. Jack paused for a moment and frowned down at the arm in his grasp, then pressed the side of his skull to Sirius' chest, much to the surprise of the man. "Oh, well, that's the problem, there," Jack said, sounding cheery, like he'd just solved a stubborn riddle. "You can't pass through here. You're quite dead."

"D-dead!" Sirius sputtered, taking a step back and pulling his arm away from Jack. "What do you mean, dead?" he demanded. "How preposterous. If I were dead, how could I be here, talking to... talking to... a skeleton..." he finished dully. His hand went to his hair, running through it nervously, a habit he'd retained from the years when he'd been young, handsome, and alive.

"I'm afraid so," Jack said with some sympathy. "Most of the ordinary citizens of Halloween Town can only leave on Halloween night," he said, "and that's still several months away. Crossing to the human world isn't like crossing into another holiday realm. They're all interconnected, but the mortal world is different."

"But, I have to get back," Sirius pleaded. "My godson _needs_ me."

Jack shook his skull. "I'm sorry, Sirius," he said, proving that he _had_ been listening earlier, though this provided no solace. "You're one of us now. It's really not so bad here," he added, trying to cheer Sirius up a bit. "There's always lots to do to keep you busy before Halloween. Mummies can't re-wrap their own bandages, you know, and someone has to exercise the ghosts or they'll never lose that holiday weight. Why, just last week, one of the werewolves had a litter, and she's still looking for a sitter who's relatively bite-proof. I'll tell you what," Jack added, with an impossible wink of his brow ridge. "If you want, I can even put in a good word for you with the banshee sisters. Two of them are still single, I hear."

Sirius looked baffled at this. He understood all the words Jack was saying, but somehow they seemed to be in the wrong order, because nothing he was saying made any sense. "Ghosts?" Sirius asked incredulously. "Werewolves? Banshees?" Something wasn't adding up between what Jack was saying and what Sirius knew to be the truth. "But, my world _has_ all those things!" Sirius shouted. "My _best friend_ is a werewolf," he said, "and I'm on a first-name basis with several ghosts, not to mention literally _dozens_ upon _dozens_ of witches."

"Really?" Jack asked, his voice equal parts skepticism and veiled excitement. "So... are you not _from_ the human world, then?" he asked, taking new interest in Sirius.

"Yes!" Sirius cried, then immediately amended the statement. "Well, sort of. It's kind of... _complicated_. I'm a wizard, see, and everyone I know is a wizard or a witch, and we're fighting this blokes that call themselves Death Eaters, and—"

" _Death Eaters_!?" Jack exclaimed, interrupting Sirius and taking him by the shoulder. "Your world sounds like a veritable _utopia_ of terrifying creatures. I must see it at once! Zero!" he called, looking around for the little ghost dog who leapt into the clearing at the sound of Jack's voice. Forgetting Sirius and his predicament for a moment, Jack knelt down to speak to Zero, adopting a grave tone.

"Zero, I need you to listen very carefully," Jack said. Zero barked and wagged the back half of his intangible body. Sirius couldn't tell if the dog was responding to the words, or to the fact that its master was paying it attention as any other dog would. "Is there a place near here where ghosts can pass through, Zero?" he asked the dog. "Do you know it?"

Zero barked twice, floating playfully in a circle around Jack's knees, and then bounded off to the opposite end of the clearing to yipe eagerly at a tree that neither Jack nor Sirius had noticed before. It was an ordinary tree in every way except that it looked as though it had been the canvas for a rather unusual mural. In a patch as tall as Sirius and twice as wide, someone had painted bricks on this tree, and for no reason Sirius could figure out. Jack, however, was captivated.

"It's just like the holiday doors," he said to himself, running his skeletal fingers over the bark, "except it has no handle. How do you open a door without a knob?" he posed, thinking out loud.

"What holiday doors?" Sirius asked. "What knob?"

Jack, who looked as though he may have forgotten that Sirius was even present, looked down at his companion and explained. "Deep in the forest," he told Sirius," there is a ring of trees with pictures just like this one. They're doorways to the other holiday realms." He turned back to the tree in question, and added, "But this tree has no doorknob."

"Doorways, eh?" Sirius wondered to himself, scratching at the stubble on his chin absently. "A painting of a brick wall?"

Sirius smirked to himself and took several steps away from the tree. "Stand back," he told Jack, who looked annoyed at being order around by a former human, but did as he was asked anyway.

"What are you going to do?" Jack asked, sounding suspicious but intrigued.

"The trick is to take it at a run if you're nervous," he said cryptically, shaking his shoulders loose in preparation. He took off a second later, running full tilt at the portrait of what he hoped was a brick barrier. He hoped desperately that he wasn't about to simply headbutt a very real tree, and closed his eyes a moment before the impact.

Instantly, his ears were assaulted by the a beautiful, terrible, familiar sound, and he stopped running, opening his eyes. He almost cried in relief when he saw that he was standing in Kings' Cross Station, just in front of the barrier between Platforms Ten and Eleven. A sudden intake of air next to him made him jump, and he looked over to see an amazed Jack standing there, looking all around him with the joy and awe of a child. Jack looked down at Sirius with a look that made the man nervous, and asked a question Sirius was certain would be the cause of a great deal of trouble and mischief and possibly a catchy melody.

"What's this?"


End file.
